At present, as the greenhouses develop toward industrialization and intelligence, more and more detection devices are mounted on the movement monitoring platform in order to realize the regular automatic cruise and monitoring of crop growth and environmental information, thereby achieving accurate and efficient information acquisition. Based on the movement monitoring platform, the greenhouse information collection and monitoring system is usually powered by lithium batteries and other rechargeable batteries. In order to ensure the normal cruise and monitoring of the system, there is a need for regular charging operation. However, the traditional artificial timed charging wastes time and energy, not only increases the labor intensity, but also is prone to insufficient charging or over charging, and thereby not only affecting the service life of the batteries, reducing the reliability of the equipment operation, and meanwhile, increasing labor costs and causing reduction in the economic benefits of the greenhouse. Therefore, it is a key issue to be solved for the automatic cruise platform for the greenhouse of how to provide a timely and reliable charging for the movement monitoring platform during the power shortage or the interval between two cruise tasks to ensure the continuous, reliable and smooth implementation of the automatic cruise task and provide timely feedback information for the environmental regulation of the greenhouse.
In the field of the existing wired contact charging, the positioning of the movement platform on the charging socket is generally detected visually or via a laser distance measuring sensor. The invention patent application with application No. 201010576969.5 discloses an intelligent charging device for a robot and an automatic charging method thereof. The intelligent charging device comprises a power connection module, a movement module, a battery monitoring module, an external image acquisition module, a storage module and a main control module. Wherein after receiving the charging request signal, the main control module will control the external image acquisition module to collect the images of the surrounding environment of the robot, search the image matching with the reference image of the external power socket in the collected image, and determines whether or not the external power socket exists; if the external power socket exists, the position of the power connection module relative to the external power socket will be calculated, and the movement module is controlled to drive the robot to move towards the external power socket, thereby aligning the power connection module and the external power socket and connecting the power connection module with the external power socket. According to the device and the method, the external power socket can be searched to complete electric energy supplement in case of insufficient electric quantity of batteries, however, for the device and the method, the power socket is positioned via visual search, the distance through which the robot goes while searching for the power socket via visual search is unknown, resulting in reduction of the working efficiency of the robot. As the charging device is installed on the robot, not only the weight of the robot is increased, but also the unnecessary loads of electric energy are added, which further aggravates the power shortage of the system. When the system searches for the charging socket, the relative position between the power connection module of the robot and the socket requires a higher movement accuracy of the robot, and as 220V AC is generally applied in the external power socket, and the power socket has been in the power-up state, when the power connection module docks with the socket for adjustment, there will be some frictions and collisions, resulting in some potential safety hazards.
The invention patent application with application No. 200810131384.5 discloses an “automatic charging self-discipline movement robot device and an automatic charging method thereof”. The device will receive an infrared signal when the remaining battery capacity is insufficient or when the charging command is inputted; a microcomputer detects the position of the charging socket in accordance with the signal received by the infrared signal receiving device and controls the robot to move; and electric energy is obtained by making contact with the connecting terminal. The design of the charging socket separated from the robot effectively reduces the loads of the movement robot, thereby improving the cruising ability of the robot. However, the charging socket device requires the movement robot to move to the charging socket without error and has a high requirement on the movement accuracy of the robot approaching the charging socket, and the device and method for searching the charging socket are complex, resulting in a substantial increase in the cost of the device.
In summary, as for the existing automatic charging device for the intelligent movement platform, owing to the limitation of its device and method, it is difficult to meet the demand that when carrying out timed automatic cruise for a long time without human intervention, the movement platform for monitoring the crop growth of the greenhouse and the environmental needs to return to the charging area automatically and quickly for timely charging at cruise intervals. As the existing device requires a high precision to the movement position of the movement platform and the movement platform must stop at a fixed charging point to complete charging, when there is a positional deviation of the movement platform from the charging device, the adjustment of the movement platform control device, and making the relative displacement between the charging port on the movement platform and the plug of the charging device close to zero, will meet large technical difficulties, result in significant increase in the cost of the platform and fail to meet the requirements of facility environmental on safety protection and electrical safety.